GAMBLING DEBTS NEARLY DROVE ME TO SUICIDE

GAMBLING DEBTS NEARLY DROVE ME TO SUICIDE
Snooker legend Willie Thorne lived a double life
By Jane Symons

To fans he was Mr Maximum, the genius with a cue who repeatedly racked up perfect scores. But when he stepped out of the limelight he was consumed by doubts, depression and despair.


His legendary love of gambling had grown into an addiction and as the years went on, his hand-eye co-ordination began to fail — perhaps a warning sign of the cataracts he was to develop.

As he reveals in his new autobiography, Taking a Punt On My Life, the days of big earnings were slipping away and the bookmakers, money lenders and taxman were closing in.

“I found it very easy to pretend nothing was wrong but as soon as I was home and the door closed behind me, I just slumped into a chair and vegetated.”

Then one Monday afternoon in 2002, Willie decided to take “the coward’s way out” and swallowed as many sleeping tablets as he could lay his hands on. “I just couldn’t face life, I couldn’t face being a failure,” he admits.


Depression and insomnia have been lifelong companions but Willie Thorne found it impossible to talk about his feelings



“It all seemed very easy and very natural, as if I was preparing for a good night’s sleep – except the number of pills I was swallowing was enough to ensure it would be the last night’s sleep I would ever have on this earth.”

It wasn’t a sudden decision. “The thought of killing myself had been in my head for a while.” In a Bangkok hotel he had stood in his top floor room looking out of the window - but not for the view. “I was thinking to myself, that if I had enough courage I could jump.”

Looking back, he says: “I was a coward, I was a coward for not doing it, then later I was a coward for not doing it properly.” Now, he says he was a coward for ever thinking he could leave his children, wife Jill and his adoring mother in such a selfish way.


Luckily when his 11-year-old stepson James returned from school he realised something was wrong and Willie was rushed to hospital. “My eyes opened several hours later and immediately started filling with tears.”

Depression and insomnia have been lifelong companions but Willie found it impossible to talk about his feelings. He almost picked up the phone to call Samaritans and a few months before his suicide attempt Willie spoke to his doctor about feeling stressed and having trouble sleeping. But he gave no hint of an increasingly desperate struggle to juggle his debts and the daily thoughts of death.

In the months following the suicide attempt, he was prescribed Prozac but decided therapy was not for him. Having his demons dragged into the daylight and coming clean about the extent of his gambling debts and depression, have been his way of working through it.

It’s not an approach he recommends and his advice to anyone else struggling with depression is: “Go and seek help”. He says: “It’s almost too embarrassing speaking to family or friends, even though they love you more than anyone but at least talk to your doctor.”

Willie still has down days, and bears the scars of those dark years. “It was incredibly stressful and I’m paying for it now. I had a mild stroke last year and to be honest, I’m surprised I didn’t have one before. I was living on my nerves.”

The stroke hit in the middle of a thank you speech at a charity event. “I realised I had started slurring my words and was all over the place. It had been a long week and I just apologised explaining I was tired.” As he returned to his seat, his stepson James, now a young man, told him: “Do you realise that for 30 seconds you just mumbled, you made no sense at all?”

It is probably the second time James has saved Willie’s life because when they got home he mentioned the incident to his mother. Jill, a speech therapist, realised it could be serious.

“She insisted I went to the doctor who said my blood pressure it was the highest could be and sent me straight down to hospital to have a scan.” It revealed Willie had suffered a mini-stroke. He was prescribed statins and pills for hypertension and told to lose weight.

Like all the celebrity contestants, Willie lost some weight during his brief, but memorable, stint on Strictly Come Dancing. He loved the show and has just two regrets — being voted off so early and strutting his stuff on the dancefloor at the end-of-show party. He had only just come out of plaster after breaking his leg in a golfing accident and after waking in pain the following day discovered he had broken his leg again.

The past few years have been a difficult time for Willie, his brother Malcolm, to whom he was incredibly close, was having treatment for cancer of the throat. “He had been to the doctor’s on five or six occasions because he could not get rid of this cough. The doctor kept giving him cough stuff. By the time it was diagnosed it had spread to his lungs.”

Malcolm, who managed a snooker hall had chemotherapy and radiotherapy “which knocked him sideways”, but earlier this year he died, with his wife and Willie by his bedside.

“It is so unfair,” Willie says. “Malcolm was never a smoker and had never been a drinker. He was a passive smoker in that he worked in snooker clubs which were thick with it. Roy Castle got it from passive smoking too but why didn’t I?” he asks with perhaps a touch of guilt. “Some of the clubs I played in the early years you could barely see the other side of the room. Why does it get some people and not others?” he asks.

Then he answers his own question. “I might not have been a lucky gambler but I have to realise that in so many other ways, I am a very lucky man.”


To order Taking a Punt On My Life by Willie Thorne (Vision Sports Publishing, £18.99) with free UK delivery, call 0871 988 8367 (10p/min from BT landlines) with your card details, or send a cheque payable to Express Newspapers to: The Express Bookshop, PO Box 200, Falmouth, TR11 4WJ or order via www.expressbookshop.co.uk